Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Turns the Enterprise Crew Into Puppets in Latest Episode
The crew of the Enterprise has been turned into sentient puppets — and the episode is now streaming on Paramount+.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4, Episode 5, titled "Level Five Transporter Accident," premiered on Thursday, 20 August 2026 on Paramount+, where it is listed at 54 minutes with a TV-PG rating (Paramount+). The instalment is the fifth of a ten-episode fourth season (TrekMovie). The episode was first teased at San Diego Comic-Con in 2025 (Variety).
In the story, Spock — played by Ethan Peck — helps Scotty (Martin Quinn) with an experiment to set a record for the longest distance an object has ever been sent via transporter, the franchise's fictional matter-transmission technology. The experiment goes wrong. The transporter accident turns the crew into puppets while Spock and the now-puppet crew battle a band of Orion pirates attempting to steal the Enterprise (Variety).
Peck was the only member of the main cast who was not turned into a puppet in the episode. He told Variety he was initially skeptical about the premise before the puppets arrived on set (Variety).
The puppets were built by Jim Henson's Creature Shop, with Jason Weber serving as creative supervisor. Designs started from 3D renderings with exaggerated features modelled on the real actors — Captain Pike's distinctive hair and broad shoulders among them. Most puppets were hand-built using traditional Henson methods. The puppet for Commander Pelia, played by Carol Kane, was made with synthetic horsehair tubing on a spiralled form (Variety).
The episode was directed by Jordan Canning, who previously worked on the Fraggle Rock reboot at Apple TV+ — a credit that aligns neatly with the practical-puppetry approach the episode required (Variety).
What makes this episode stand out is the collision of two very different traditions: a half-century-old science-fiction franchise built on prosthetics, stunt work and starship sets, and the hand-built puppetry lineage of the Henson workshop. Strange New Worlds has a record of format-switching — the show previously staged a musical episode — but handing the Enterprise crew to a team of fabricators and foam is a different order of ambition. The episode runs under an hour, and the creative energy sits in the details: a captain whose puppet keeps his hair, an engineer with horsehair tubing, and a Vulcan left standing at full human height among them.
